96. Forever Young &...

Lyrics

Let's start in style, let's dance for awhile
Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you going to drop the bomb or not?

Let us die young or let us live forever
We don't have the power, but we never say never
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music's for the sad men

Can you imagine when this race is won?
Turn our golden faces into the sun
Praising our leaders, we're getting in tune
The music's played by the, the madmen

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever ever?
Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever? Forever young

Some are like water, some are like the heat
Some are a melody and some are the beat
Sooner or later they all will be gone
Why don't they stay young?

It's so hard to get old without a cause
I don't want to perish like a fleeing horse
Youth's like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever

So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams swinging out of the blue
We let them come true

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever?
Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever?

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?

Well, this an 80's song in every fiber of its being. I like it quite a lot, and it's by far Alphaville's best. I linked it quite obviously to a movie about someone who wants to stay forever young.

The Movie: The Tin Drum (Die Blechttrommel) (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)

The Tin Drum follows Oskar, a German boy, who when he is three years old is so revolted by the decadence, immorality and debauchery of his elders that he decides to stop growing. Thus, he throws himself of the stairs and lives through the rise of fascism and the Second World War, as a toddler, who protests by beating his tin drum and screaming very loudly. Once the war is over he decides he wants to start to grow again. So yeah, Oskar is a rather simplistic and way too obvious metaphor for the state of Germany during the first half of the 20th century.  As a parable for Germany the movie is indeed rather stupid. And it doesn't really have anything interesting to say about the rise of fascism or about the Second World War. To be fair though, the point that seemingly nice, ordinary people became Nazi's too, may be a rather obvious one, but the film does make it in an interesting way; The ideology of Oscar family only comes to light in a couple of scenes. For the most part we see them going on with their daily lives. It's just too bad that the movie doesn't care to really explore the reasons for why these seemingly nice, ordinary people would be inclined to Nazism. 

The Tin Drum won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Some would probably say that this is unnecessary information; it could be deduced from the previous paragraph, which indeed does make this movie sound as some sort of horrible combination of Forrest Gump and La Vita e Bella. Now, while this movie may not work on a metaphor for German history, it is actually very interesting in another way. In some ways this movie is closer to David Cronenberg than to Roberto Benigni, and it is actually quite surprising that it won an Oscar. Now I must say that I love Forrest Gump and La Vita e Bella, and think that they express their ideas about respectively post-war America, and The World War Two in a far better, and more interesting way than The Tin Drum.

The Tin Drum can also be seen as a series of vignettes about people struggling with their physical and mental limitations. It's fascinated by bodily (dis)functions, by sexual desire and sexual deviations, and by physical and mental illnesses. There are here many genuinely odd, and disquieting scenes, which you definitely won't see in an ordinary historical Oscar-winning movie. This is in fact the first movie I've seen that presents the birth of a child from the point of view of the child being born. We see the baby sitting in the womb, waiting to get out. We see the vagina opening from the baby's view point, and we see the baby's first images of the real world. The following shots of the born baby are even weirder. It seems to be fully formed. It seemed to me as if the same actor playing the three-year old Oskar is playing the baby, only he is now naked, wet, bold, and shot in close-up so he doesn't seem so large. This just makes it weirder, because the proportions of the baby seem to be completely off. 

It is very much possible to look at Oskar's fate, not as a metaphor for Germany, but as a character study of a mentally and physically retarded person, who understands his limitations, and is aware that he cannot do anything about it, and is aware that because of his limitations he will never be able to fully function in the real world, and understand it. We can then see his screaming  as screams of genuine frustration, rather than as screams of protest. (Which is why the movie would have been a lot better if it got rid of the Second World War altogether). It's certainly the only way Oskar makes a genuine contribution to the world. Oskar's screams are so high they break glass. When he screams in a doctor's office he breaks all the doctor's jars full of dead animals in distilled water, of which we naturally get a very leering shot. The doctor is so fascinated by this he conducts further research and Oskar winds up being an interesting scientific object, as he turns out to have rather unique vocal chords. All of this makes the scenes later in the movie when Oskar is sexually experimenting (in some rather weird ways) with his babysitter all the more fascinating and disturbing. Especially so, because while the character of Oscar may be 18 years old (or rather he was born 18 years ago), he still refuses to grow, and thus is still played by the same actor David Bennent, who was barely 13 when he filmed the movie.  

The story of Agnes, Oskar's mother is interesting in this regard too. She is conceived in the opening scene of the movie, when a Polish arsonist is running away from the police and hides under the skirt of Oskar's grandma, working on her potato field. While under the skirt, he basically rapes her, and so Agnes is conceived. When Agnes grows up, she falls in love with two men, and all three of them go on to live together in the same house. Thus, it's not actually clear who Oskar's father is. Later on, the most disturbing scene of the movie refers back to this problem, when a baby is born and it's father may either be Oskar, or Alfred. Alfred is legally considered Oskar's father, because the other guy, Jan, is Agnes' cousin. She can only fall in love with him because of his physical limitations. Because of these he was rejected by the army and he couldn't fight in the First World War. At the half of the movie Agnes dies. She sees one day how eels are caught: The head of a dead horse is thrown into the water and the eels find their way in its various cavities. These repulses her so much, that at dinner that day she is physically disgusted by the idea of eating the eels. And of course we get a close-up of the chopped up head of an eel that's not entirely dead yet and continues to move. In any case, when Alfred forces her to eat the eels Agnes goes completely mad. After that dinner she cannot eat anything but fish. Any fish, cooked or not. One day she eats one fish too many and dies in her own vomit. There are more scenes dealing with these themes of mental and physical shortcomings. There is a whole subplot involving midgets doing circus tricks, and there is one scene whose only purpose seems to be to hint that a certain neighbor may be a gay pedophile. All of this means that despite its rather dull, simplistic ideas about the war and fascism, ostensibly the main themes of the movie, I still consider this to be a very good movie. 

I am not very familiar with Volker Schlöndorff's work, but I recently saw his latest movie Diplomacy, based on a play of the same name. It's basically a chamber play taking place during a single night, and it's about Swedish consul Raoul Nordling trying to dissuade Nazi General von Cholditz from destroying Paris (a meeting that never really took place). I think that movie has some of the same virtues and problems as The Tin Drum. Diplomatie is a deeply Eurocentric movie, that makes some really idiotic and rather simplistic points about The Second World War, and the idea of Paris. But as straightforward drama with complicated characters, it is really interesting.